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Amanda Wall

Art Teacher

Amanda Lavoughn Wall (born 1971) is an American painter, born and raised in rural Kansas. She has been living in Brooklyn since 1999. Amanda's background in web and graphic design, combined with her Native American Heritage, influenced her geometric and fluid abstract paintings, some incorporating light bulbs, light boxes, and multiple illuminated holes in wood and plastic. Her more recent series of self expressive and vulnerable self portraits portray a superficial beauty at first glance, while subtly revealing either symbolically her pain and suffering or metaphors for her sources of strength and survival. Additionally, Amanda painted her children, family, and previous lovers.

She draws inspiration from her favorite portrait painters: Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, and Johannes Vermeer. Frida, for her ability to interpret her physical and emotional pain in a way that has captured everyone's hearts, and Klimt and Vermeer for their unmatched ability to capture a woman's beauty so softly with oil paint, while revealing a darker emotion in their subject's gaze.

Amanda attended the University of Tulsa, graduating with a BFA, concentrating on graphic design under the teaching of Teresa Valero, who remained an influential mentor throughout her life. She began a successful career as a graphic and web designer at Littlefield Advertising Agency and Williams Communications Group in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she won an ADDY Award for a Phillips Petroleum website. This lead to an opportunity in Bergamo, Italy at Media Artists Inc.

After Italy, she moved to New York City, continuing her career as a designer. While pregnant with her son, Jacob, she grew restless and returned to her passion for painting. While juggling motherhood, another son, Dalton, and her art, she occupied a studio in the Navy Yard, in Brooklyn, where she was able to paint larger works on three and four feet plastic cubes with acrylic, while playing with lights and light boxes.

Following divorce and the untimely death of her mother, Amanda created an introspective series of self portraits. Simultaneously, she was a tattoo apprentice at Vagrant Souls Tattoo, switching between mediums from oil to ink and watercolor. Amanda was fascinated by the Asian style of her talented tattoo mentors and feels she became a better illustrator during her time as an apprentice.

Currently, Amanda is focusing on her paintings, enjoying instructing at the Art Studio NY, and planning to work on a Master of Fine Arts degree.